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Images I, L105

Introduction

The six pieces contained in the two books of Debussy’s Images were, as their name indicates, the product of Debussy the art-lover (one might say Debussy the ‘see-er’). They perhaps derive ultimately from his early reading of Baudelaire, who declared that ‘the whole visible universe is nothing but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a kind of pasture for the imagination to digest and transform’. The poet also gave voice to this thought in his famous poem ‘Correspondances’ in the collection Les fleurs du mal, initially banned by the censor in 1857 and for that reason, among others, required reading for the artistic young of the following decades: ‘Scents, colours and sounds reflect one another.’

The six Images were in Debussy’s mind in some form as early as December 1901, when he played versions of two of them (‘Reflets dans l’eau’ and ‘Mouvement’) to Ricardo Viñes, but the complete list of titles was not fixed until July 1903, when he sent these to the publisher Fromont. He had just completed the Estampes, and the Images, the first book of which was published in October 1905, can be heard as a development along the same colouristic lines, following earlier intimations in various pieces by Chabrier and in Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. The technique has been called one of illusion—what you see on the printed page is often not at all what you get, depending largely on your use of the sustaining pedal—but equally Debussy shared the concerns of such ‘colourful’ composers as Berlioz and Liszt that overtly descriptive music should also work in purely structural terms.

The small wave forms of ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ and its key of D flat major might suggest it was a spin-off from La mer, except that the above chronology points, if anything, to the relationship being reversed. Debussy jokingly referred to the piece as being written ‘according to the most recent discoveries in harmonic chemistry’. While this is, no doubt intentionally, a trifle exaggerated, what is disturbing is the way the dreamlike opening, a standard eight-bar phrase, is immediately interrupted by chromatic chords: throughout the piece, the reflections in the water go on being unsettled by pebbles thrown from an unseen hand. The essential circularity of this piece is echoed in the final ‘Mouvement’, which is almost an early Étude (‘Pour les triolets’?). Marked to be played ‘with a fantastical but precise lightness’, it achieves an extraordinary rapprochement between academic note-spinning and imaginative atmosphere, with a few fanfares added for good measure. The central ‘Hommage à Rameau’, while outwardly placid and monumental, partakes of more traditional rhetorical structures and of the effortless internal dynamism that is so much a part of the genius of Rameau, ‘without any of that pretence towards German profundity, or to the need of emphasizing things with blows of the fist’, as Debussy put it when reviewing a performance of the first two acts of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux in 1903—which possibly inspired his piece, although searches for direct quotations from the earlier composer have so far proved fruitless.

Any new release from Stephen Hough is a keenly awaited event, and this recital of some of Debussy’s best-loved works for solo piano sets the bar high in this, the centenary of the composer’s death.» More

A new album from Marc-André Hamelin is always cause for celebration. Here in his first Debussy recording for Hyperion he presents the two books of Images: Debussy’s colouristic masterpiece, a bewitching compendium of ‘scents, colours and sounds’. ...» More